Information Research Weblog

Noted on the Crave blog: Sony opens book on new Reader
and on LIS News

It's always ironic when papers on OA are published in non-OA journals. Such is the case with a couple of papers in the current LIBER Quarterly:

One is "Embedding Open Access into the European Landscape – the Contribution of LIBER" by Paul Ayris:

Abstract. This paper continues an earlier published history of the OAI Workshops, organised under the aegis of the LIBER Access Division, in CERN Geneva. It discusses the OAI5 Workshop, held on 18-20 April 2007, which underlines the emerging importance of Open Access to support information provision and exchange across Europe.

The other is "Public Policy and the Politics of Open Access" by David C. Prosser:

Abstract In the five years since the launch of the Budapest Open Access Initiative in February 2002, one of the most striking developments in the scholarly communications landscape has been the increasing interest taken in open access at a policy level. Today, open access (in the form of both self-archiving and open access journals) is routinely discussed and debated at an institutional-level, within research-funding bodies, nationally, and internationally. The debate has moved out of the library and publisher communities to take a more central place in discussions on the ‘knowledge economy’, return on investment in research, and the nature of e-science. This paper looks at some of the public policy drivers that are impacting on scholarly communications and describes the major policy initiatives that are supporting a move to open access.

The first of these doesn't look particularly fascinating, but I would have like to have the possibility of reading the second, without having to subscribe, but to do that I have to wait six months.

The presentations from the Berlin 5 conference on open access (held not in Berlin but in Padua, Italy) are now online.

I haven't read all of them yet, and probably won't, since, as far as I can tell they are all Powerpoint presentations without the accompanying paper. As a result, some elements of practically all of the presentations are unintelligible without the context and in one or two cases the presentation as a whole seems to bear little resemblance to the title of the paper or to the abstract.

By and large, it looks to have been a pretty humdrum affair, with the same old issues being debated, wheels being reinvented and nothing new emerging.

Repositories and the 'author pays' models seems to be the only models discussed and mention of the collaborative, no-money-changes-hands model of Information Research (and of other journals covered in our Case Studies series) is non-existent.

Fred Friend of UCL and JISC tells the audience that JISC (the UK's Joint Information Systems Comittee of the Higher Education Funding Councils) "is now working with other organizations on models which fund gold OA publication charges as part of the research process and budget" having experimented with spending &pund;384,000 to persuade publishers to adopt author-charges and finding that it 'did not scale' - i.e., it would cost to much to continue.

I wonder if JISC has any idea of how many OA journals, operating on a subsidy and collaboration basis, that amount of money could have funded? With a £10,000 start-up subsidy, JISC could have got 38 OA journals under way - or 15 journals could have been given a £5,000 a year for five years with the same amount of money (or, rather, a little less). That could have made a very significant impact on the development of open access in the UK and could have persuaded a number of small-circulation, scholarly journals to have converted to the OA route. As it is, £384,000 has gone into the pockets of shareholders. Great thinking, JISC!

It seems that Harvard's top economists are looking more to electronic dissemination of their work than they are to publication in the top journals. The explanation from Dani Rodrik's Weblog:

Several pieces of evidence bolster the view that one factor contributing to these trends is that the role of journals in disseminating research has been reduced. One is that the citation benefit to publishing in a top general-interest journal now appears to be fairly small for top-department authors. Another is that Harvard authors appear to be quite successful in garnering citations to papers that are not published in top journals. The fact that the publication declines appear to be a top-department phenomenon (as opposed to a prolific-author phenomenon) suggests that a top-department affiliation may be an important determinant of an author’s ability to sidestep the traditional journal system.

Rodrik is Editor of The Review of Economics and Statistics and he notes that his own experience as an editor of a prestigious journal supports this conclusion.

It's been a while since I last checked on the 'hits' on papers published in Information Research, so here's an update. It's a pretty crude measure of popularity, but the best we can do at the moment. Here we have the most hit papers in each of the published volumes of the journal from 1 to 11:

• Volume 1: An action research approach to curriculum development. 70,618 hits; 15 Google Scholar cites (4,708 hits to 1 cite)
• Volume 2: Scanning the business environment for information: a grounded theory approach. 55,272 hits; 16 cites (3,454:1)
• Volume 3: Business Use of The World Wide Web: a report on further investigations. 17,298 hits; 42 cites (412:1)
• Volume 4: Information in organisations: directions for information management. 46,971 hits; 18 cites (2610:1)
• Volume 5: Recent trends in user studies: action research and qualitative methods. 33,612 hits; 21 cites (1,600:1)
• Volume 6: Determining organizational information needs: the Critical Success Factors approach. 65,863 hits; 13 cites (5,066:1)
• Volume 7: Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning. 79,429 hits; 30 cites (2,648:1)
• Volume 8: The nonsense of knowledge management. 158,371 hits; 126 cites (1,257:1)
• Volume 9: Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour. 47,390 hits; 13 cites (3,645:1)
• Volume 10: Information and knowledge management: dimensions and approaches. 13,749 hits; 4 cites (3,437:1)
• Volume 11: Scanning the business external environment for information: evidence from Greece. 17,070 hits; 0 cites.

The data reveal that it takes an average of 2,884 hits to generate 1 citation in Google Scholar. I shall have to get round to checking out that number with more of the papers.

The advice of the lobbyist retained by the publishers has been revealed on the Web (Peter Suber has more of the story). The first paragraph of that advice is very telling:

The Coalition faces the daunting task of trying to win support for an issue in which publishers are not sympathetic - continuing to charge fees for access to scientific journals. It's hard to fight an adversary that manages to be both elusive and in possession of a better message: Free information. There's no magical sound bit that will cure this issue, however, at the present time there is little or no "pushback" from the publishing industry. To inject the industry's position into the debate, we recommend bypassing mass "consumer" audiences in favor of reaching a more elite group of decision makers employing strategies that emphasize "high-concept" rhetoric and in-the-trenches political-style communications.

Mmmm, interesting, eh? There's an even more interesting set of Rhetorical campaign points:

• Develop simple messages (e.g., Public access equals government censorship; Scientific journals preserve the quality/pedigree of science; government seeking to nationalize science and be a publisher) for use by Coalition members
• Develop analogies that put the public access issue into a context whereby target audiences will understand its pitfalls and perilous implications not to mention the hypocrisy of science leaders getting salaries and honoraria but declaring the publishing industry's need for capital as being somehow immoral
  • Paint a picture of what the world would look like without peer-reviewed articles.
  • In theory this may provide free taxpayer access to research that they fund, but they will pay eventually with substandard articles and their money being used to develop and maintain an electronic article depot rather than to fund new research.

Enough said, I think. It's beginning to dawn on the PRISM Coalition that they have shot themselves in the foot by adopting some of what was proposed and, clearly, for them to adopt some of the other ideas would be even more disastrous. For example, how much of the industry's profits go to investment in capital developments? Well, these companies' reports are on the Web and Reed Elsevier, for example, report that out of an operating profit of £1,210 million in 2006 (up 9% on 2005), capital expenditure was £196 million, while dividends paid to shareholders amounted to £371 million (up 10% on 2005), with a further £271 million being spent on share repurchases. So, 16% on capital developments and a total of 53% on dividends and share repurchasing. I think we can see where the company's priorities lie.
Not that this is a bad thing - companies are in business to pay dividends to shareholders, but I wonder what the profits would be if the publishers had to pay for their raw material and for the peer-review? I suspect that we would see many fewer journals and an even more rapid increase in true OA publishing.

Good news on the Open Access front. The Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie is moving from toll access (i.e., subscription based) to open access. Keven Haggerty, the editor of CJS/CCS, writes in his editorial:

The financial implications of this move remain somewhat opaque, and I have agonized over this issue. The situation of independent scholarly publishing in Canadian has always been precarious. This is particularly true with the CJS/CCS which does not receive any association funds. Retiring the hard copy version of the journal eliminates subscription revenue, which is one of our major sources of funding. That said, mimicking wider publishing trends, the journal’s subscriptions have been substantially declining at the same time that our electronic readership (through Project MUSE and other venues) has increased dramatically. Moreover, it was always the case that most of our subscription revenues went to cover the costs associated with producing a hard copy volume, such as printing, subscription management and postage.

He goes on to note that CJS/CCS has been subsidised by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, but he expects to continue to receive these funds, since the SSHRC is an advocate of open access.

Many scholarly journals, published by universities and university presses must be in very similar situations - living off subsidy and subscriptions, the latter paying for most of the paper-associated costs (as well as those of maintaining the record of subscribers). With the move to OA, such costs are wiped out at an instant and what is then need to live on is a very much smaller amount of money. In the case of Information Research it is a zero amount of money, since there is no income and no monetary subsidy. Perhaps with this example, and the example of new scholarly journals taking the free OA track from the beginning, universities will begin to realise the advantages of OA. True OA - not the author-charge model - what I have called the Platinum Route.

This news picked up from Heather Morrison, via Peter Suber

The publishers' lobby organization has changed the language of its top page - no doubt the result of the wave of opposition it aroused by attempting to mislead researchers, funders and, most importantly, the policy makers.

However, no one should imagine that this means that the organization's ideas have changed, nor its way of putting a spin on just about everything it says. For example, we are directed from the top page to:

Learn more about government intervention and the risks and unintended consequences of proposed legislation;"

and, clicking on the link, we find:

Various initiatives and proposals have been put forth by special interest groups and some legislators that would force private sector publishers to surrender to the federal government all peer-reviewed articles that report on research supported by federal research grants.

Such undue government intervention in scholarly publishing poses inherent risks and problems, including:

* Threats to the economic viability of journals and the independent system of peer review

* The potential for introducing selective bias into the scientific record

* Government data repositories being subject to budget uncertainties

* Unwarranted increases in government spending to compete with private sector publishing

* Expropriation of publishers' investments in copyrighted articles

* Undermining the reasonable protections of copyright holders"

Let's look at these in turn: the first links the economic viability of journals with the independent system of peer review, as though if the former is threatened, as it is, the latter will also be detrimentally affected. However, this is not the case: the system of peer review exists because of the willingness of academics to give their time freely to ensure the integrity of published research work. True, it is not perfect, but it works and it would continue to work in an open access world: there is no reason whatsoever to assume that if the academic community wished peer-review to continue, it would not do so. However, the academic community could do the established commercial publishers considerable damage if they withdrew their voluntary labour. How, then, would the publishers ensure the integrity of the research record? Presumably, if the subscriptions continued to flow, they would be quite happy. Methinks they do protest too much on this point!

The second point on the introduction of 'selective bias' is presumably related to the first: they are suggesting that if peer review did not exist in an open access world, and continued in the commercial publishing world, the quality of what is published would be lowered and 'bias' would result. But this is nonsense: the answer is to repeat the points above. There is no necessary connection between commercial publishing and peer review. Indeed some publishers are quite happy to publish journals with no scholarly review, or with editorial review only - are they leaping to the barricades to prevent the rise of open access? Of course not.

The notion that somehow the existence of commercial publishing is some kind of fall-back system if government-funded data repositories were to be underfunded to the extent of ceasing to exist is also nonsense. Publishers do not maintain alternative data repositories, nor do they contribute to them. Organizations such as the ESRC Data Archive in the UK collect raw data from the researchers who collect it, along with the research instruments, coding manuals, etc. No publisher does any of this work, so to link their publishing activities to the existence of data archives is simply silly.

'Unwarranted increases in government spending' - oh my, that's really a beauty! Here is an industry that obtains its raw material free of charge as a result of government, charitable foundation and industry spending on research, and then benefits from the subscriptions of the institutions that employ those same researchers, complaining that the government might cut their profits by encouraging open access publishing. That's very rich. In effect the publishers are saying: "Look government, you spend all this money to give us raw material from which we can make a profit, so please don't encourage anything that might limit those profits!" And I love the idea of 'private sector publishing'! If only! Let us imagine what 'private sector publishing' would actually involve: first, the publishers would have to pay authors to write for them, as they pay novelists and the authors of travel books, biographies, etc., etc. Then, they would have to pay academics to review the papers they had paid for to determine whether they were appropriate to publish (of course, under this system, they would rapidly forget about peer-review, since it would eat into their profits), and then they would have to market vigorously to persuade institutions to buy their products. And, at the same time they would have to compete with a public sector open access system. Can you guess what would happen? I leave it to your imaginations.

So there's a danger of government expropriating industry's investment in copyrighted articles and, final point, of undermining the rights of copyright holders. Well now, what are we to make of this? First, the industry has invested nothing in the copyrighted articles - the investment has been made by government, etc. They have an investment in the published article, but not in the original copyrighted source. And it is a moot point, I understand, from lawyer friends as to whether an author can actually sign away his or her copyright. I believe there is no case law in the UK on this point and publishers are unwilling to take a case to court in case they lose. If this is so, then the copyright holder is the author of the text and/or his or her institution, depending upon the practice of the institution and all that can be granted to the publisher is a licence to publish under negotiated terms. Perhaps those threatened copyright holders (the authors) should bear this in mind and, instead of signing away their rights - which may not actually be lawful - they should negotiate. After all, they are now in a strong position, given the existence of open access, and free, journals in so many fields.

Take all this stuff with a pinch of salt and make sure your representative in Congress or Parliament understands that lobby talk is not necessarily reporting with integrity.

The Swedish national library, Kungliga Biblioteket, has launched an R&D programme in open access under the title Open Access.se. The information is all in Swedish and my knowledge of the language amounts to little more than saying 'Hej!' - but that, plus a dictionary suggests the following.

The programme has three elements in its 2007 call for proposals:

1. The contents of open archives in universities and university colleges. This has two elements to it: creating critical mass in the free availability of scientific publications; and, Expanding the contents of open archives with new types of material.
2. Promoting the use of material in open archives and OA journals.
3. Quality issues - towards determining the framework for certifying open archives in Sweden and such issues as the services to be offered, etc.

A news item on the KB site notes that the KK-Stiftelsen (the Swedish Research Council) is contributing 2.5 million Swedish kroner (approx. £183,000 or $371,000) to the programme for 2008-2009.

Clearly, Sweden means business :-)

See http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/04/1341248&from=rss

When even one of the world's most prestigious university presses behaves in this manner one really must ask, When is the academic community going to take scholarly communication back into its own hands?

I suggested, last week, that academics should resign from editorial boards of journals published by the supporters of PRISM. Clearly, then, I had to do so myself. Below is a copy of my letter to the Editor of the International Journal of Information Management (a journal I founded). I have written in similar terms the editor of Education for Information.
----------------------------------------

Dear Philip,

I have felt for some time that there is a conflict of interest in my membership of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Information Management, given my advocacy of open access publishing and, more to the point, the fact that I am publisher and editor of an open access journal.

This feeling was strengthened by the recent announcement of the lobby group PRISM, established, as I understand by the commercial publishers as an attempt to discredit the open access mode of publishing. In particular, their claim that open access threatened the peer review process is nothing less than the 'big lie' - the propaganda technique of Dr. Goebbels - and, clearly, I cannot let my name continue to be associated with a publisher who is prepared to use this kind of tactic.

You and I both know that this claim is nonsense and it is a very great pity that the publishers are prepared to employ the services of a lobbyist who adopts this kind of strategy: it does little to encourage trust in their motives.

I particularly regret that I have to resign from the Board of a journal that I founded and with which I have been associated for so long, but in the present circumstances no other course of action is available to me.

Given that one of the claims of the PRISM Website is that the publishers spend significant amounts of money on supporting the peer review process, and given that, in common with other academic referees, I have never benefited from that spending, I shall in future refuse to undertake unpaid refereeing work for any journal which is not an open access publication.

I shall be copying this message to my colleagues on the Editorial Board and to my Weblog, in support of the open access movement.

With regrets and kind regards to you, personally,

Tom

------------------------------------------------------------

The reaction to the establishment of PRISM is growing apace! Thanks to Peter Suber for a pointer to this post from Coturnix, which summarises the debate with quotations from just about everybody.

In the last item, I suggested writing to the UCU and AAUP to find out what their reaction to PRISM is likely to be.

Here's my message to the UCU - I sent it to Malcolm Keight, National head of higher education and mkeight@ucu.org.uk and I suggest that other members of UCU should do the same:

----------------------------------- Dear Malcolm,

I'm not sure that you are the right person on the UCU contact list. but, no doubt you will pass this message on if you are not.

You will be aware of the debate that has been going on for some years now on open access to the scholarly output and of such developments as RCUK attempt to evolve some kind of policy and the government's rejection of the recommendations of the Parliamentary Committee on the subject.

The most recent development is the establishment in the USA of 'PRISM' (http://www.prismcoalition.org/), the somewhat (and deliberately) misleading "Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine". In spite of its title, this is, in fact a lobby group for the publishing industry and, no doubt it will seek to extend its activities in some way or other to the UK.

So, my question is: What is the UCU intending to do to counteract the highly misleading propositions put forward on the PRISM Web page?

My suggestion (http://www.free-conversant.com/irweblog/) is that academics should resign from the editorial boards of non-OA journals and begin to charge a daily rate for reviewing papers.

I'll be interested to have your response, -------------------------------------------------------------

Heather Morrison's pro-OA blog has a nice comment on PRISM - the publishing lobby against OA. Noting:

PRISM, the Coalition of the highly profitable publishing industry developed by a branch of the Association of American Publishers, is alerting us to their concern that they believe that the hundreds of millions of dollars a year of revenue they enjoy is at risk, and that we average citizens and voters MUST act to join their lobbying effort, and share our deep concerns about this with our U.S. representative.

I am sure that you, dear reader, are every bit as concerned as I am about this horrendous possible loss of profits for the wealthy. Urgent action is needed, now!

Let's set up a charitable foundation to help out these poor profit-makers. We can call it, "Save the Millionaires!".

Nice one, Heather!

I have another suggestion: since the publishers are spending so much money on the peer review process, isnt't it time that those who do the reviews were properly paid for it? The University and College Union in the UK, I believe, has a recommended daily rate for consultancy and similar work - or at least the Association of University Teachers had such a rate and, when I last looked, it was £650

It takes me, typically, about a day to properly review and write my comments on a paper, so £650 would seem a fair return for the work.

However, apart from that, the real issue is that the commercial publishers are making the running in trying to persuade the population to support their ludicrous claims - so what are the academics going to do? Sit back and wait to be rolled over? Business as usual? There's only one response to this development and that is to fight it. What are the American Association of University Professors and the UCU going to do in response? Can we expect them to lobby Congress and Parliament to counter the action of the publishers? I don't live in the US, but perhaps someone could write to the AAUP and ask them, and I shall do the same here in the UK asking the UCU how it proposes to counter any developments here.

And there is something else, which is long overdue, that all academics can do: resign from the editorial boards of non-OA journals, and state their daily rate for reviewing. Let's have a bit of action! I doubt if anyone will notice it when I resign from the two commercially-published journals on which I serve (one of which I founded), but if we have concerted action from thousands of academics then perhaps the publishers will understand that setting up PRISM to peddle their lies is counter-productive.

The commercial journal publishers are really in a state of panic. Reports from various sources point to their launch of PRISM: The Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine, a lobby organization to help them try to persuade the US Congress (and presumably Parliament in the UK) to ban Open Access. Of course, they don't say that: we have the usual weasel-worded statement that lobby organizations in the USA seem to be adept at. Fortunately, it isn't going to fool many on this side of the Atlantic. I can't imagine many scientists anywhere taking much notice of the proposition that:

Policies are being proposed that threaten to introduce undue government intervention in science and scholarly publishing, putting at risk the integrity of scientific research by:

• undermining the peer review process by compromising the viability of non-profit and commercial journals that manage and fund it;
• opening the door to scientific censorship in the form of selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record;
• subjecting the scientific record to the uncertainty that comes with changing federal budget priorities and bureaucratic meddling with definitive versions; and
• introducing duplication and inefficiencies that will divert resources that would otherwise be dedicated to research.

Now, what does all that mean. Well, the first one is anti free-OA journals - they are simply lying, and they know it. Free OA, scholarly journals operate the same peer review process as do commercial journals: if they didn't scholars wouldn't publish in them, but free, collaboratively supported journals are growing in number and take away submissions from the commercial journals, which will find it harder and harder to maintain quality. So - in panic - they are lying to you, because, rather like the neo-con supporters that the same lobbyists worked for, the big lie is the only strategy. Perhaps Karl Rove has gone straight from the White House to PRISM?

Number two is a nice one: here are the publishers, going down the so-called 'Green Route' by allowing self-archiving, or the 'Gold Route' of 'author payments' now complaining that this will lead to 'selective additions to or omissions from the scientific record'. What hypocrisy! This particular point just shows how misled are those who think that it is possible to negotiate with business on access. What this means is: 'If you publish in subscription journals, anyone can publish and we will bear the risks; if you want Open Access then you may not be able to afford it.'

Number three is a variant on the second. It plays with the idea that the archived version of a paper may not be the 'definitive' version - unless the publisher allows archiving of the published text. And that business about 'changing federal budget priorities and bureaucratic meddling', means "Hands off big business - let us keep on making money by allowing us to get our raw material free of charge and then charge outlandish subscription rates for the privilege of access."

And the final point? Well, here I have to agree with the publishers. Self-archiving may lead to duplication and inefficiencies, since one never knows where a paper is archived - is it in the individual's own home-pages (like mine), is it in an institutional archive, is it in a disciplinary archive (also like mine), or is it only available in the subscription journal that is only accessible to those who can afford to view it - also like some of mine :-) ?

What this recent initiative by the publishers points to is that the only sure way for the scholarly communities to take charge of the scholarly communication process is to rid themselves of their commercial exploiters and promote the publication of free, collaboratively produced and subsidised journals. Forget the Green and Gold routes insofar as they depend upon the acquiescence of the business world and go for the Platinum Route - it is the only way to take charge, and you have been exploited long enough.

Perhaps 'PRISM' really means, 'Publishers Resisting Intellectual Solidarity in the Market'!

From LIS News a story about Questia making 5,000 online books freely available. On a quick look, I guess that many of these are already freely available from sources such as Project Gutenberg. It's always nice to have alternative sources, but I couldn't see any download option

Heather Morrison's Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics has a useful entry for sources of data and information on open access.

One source she points to may be of interest to a lot of people: this is OAIster - pronounced, judging by its logo, "oyster". OAIster harvests open access sources and currently covers getting on for 12.5 million papers. An excellent tool for lesser known journals that may still contain something useful for you.

Thanks again to Peter Suber's newsletter for an item about the decision of the American Anthropological Association to transfer its publishing services to Wiley-Blackwell. The basis for the decision appears to be, in part, a report by the AAA's Director of Publishing which contains a truly amazing proposition:

Today’s electronic environment mitigates against a small scholarly publisher continuing to operate its entire program independently

I don't think I've seen such an unintelligent statement about publishing in the electronic era. It is exactly the opposite of the true situation: the electronic environment makes it easier for scholarly societies to pursue an independent programme. I would urge members of the AAA to abandon their organization (since it has abandoned them to the vagaries of commercial decision making) and develop their own alternative publishing outlets. There are many examples of collaborative, non-commercial OA journals from which they could take models and encourgement.

PS: I ought to have pointed out that the statement is also illiterate: the word sought was "militate" not "mitigate" - you can't "mitigate against" something - "mitigate" means to lessen the effect of something.

Thanks to Peter Suber's OA News for this item:

The German Research Society (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft or DFG) has announced a funding program to launch new science journals, expand existing journals, and help print journals make the transition to electronic publication. To be eligible for funding, the journals must meet the DFG guidelines for open access, peer review, and preservation. (Thanks to the Informationsplattform Open Access.)

The enlightened character of this development compares favourably with the still unresolved policy of the UK Research Councils, which seem continually to be running scared of actually making a decision - the latest information that I could find on the Website was that discussion of its report on the subject was an agenda item for a meeting of the Executive Group held on the 25 April 2007. What the outcome was appears not to be recorded. However, we know from the earlier publications on the subject that the RCUK considers that there are only two forms of open access, "author pays" and "self-archiving". The notion that research funds, instead of supporting commercial publishers through "author payments", could go to the formation of new, collaborative, no fee, no subscription e-journals, is not on their agenda. The real reason for this, of course, is that the Research Councils fear offending government policy towards business - even if those businesses lie mainly outside the UK. The evidence for this is in the UKRC's own document. The intention is announced to:

Initiate a project to investigate the impact of author-pays publication and self-archiving on research publishing. Three leading publishers (Macmillan, Blackwell and Elsevier) have indicated that they are prepared to be involved in the project.

Obviously the companies want to be involved to protect their interests and I can't envisage anything happening to seriously affect the status quo.

The issue of funding OA publishing is the subject of another pair of items in Peter's newsletter: one on the University of Wisconsin setting aside resources to pay for OA - including support for free journals; and the other points to Heather Morrison's Weblog, where, in an article on the use of National Institutes of Health research funds, she notes:

If half the articles were paid for through article processing fees, about 32,500 articles, the $30 million NIH is already paying for publication charges would cover an average of $923 per article. That this is well within the realm of feasibility is illustrated by the fact that, while $923 average is less than the fee charged by some open access publishers, but it is more than is charged by other open access publishers, including the profitable Hindawi.
The feasibility of full open access publishing for NIH-funded research becomes even more obvious when we consider the possibility of redeploying some or all of the "indirect costs", from subscriptions or site licenses to support for open access initiatives.

From a SPARC mailing list I learn that Google has not only opened its data to university research, but also requires the researchers to publish in open access journals.

I look forward to receiving the numerous submissions that will flow from this decision :-)

I had an interesting message on a mailing list today:

SAGE Publications are pleased to offer free online full text access to the current and back issues of the following selected Information Sciences <https://online.sagepub.com/cgi/register?registration=FT77503> journals, until 30 September 2007, as listed below:

• IFLA Journal
• Journal of Information Science
• Journal of Librarianship and Information Science
• Information Development
• Business Information Review
• Journal of Health Informatics

No reason is given for this interesting trial, but I assume that it is something to do with the success of open access journals. Perhaps income from them is low, since journals in the field typically have quite small subscription lists and perhaps funding them through advertising is on the cards?

For those interested in Open Access, there's an interesting PowerPoint presentation by the founders of a proposed new OA journal, Semantica and Pragmatics. They are going what I call the Platinum Route or True OA (TOA) to distinquish it from Green and Gold, which are author archiving and author payment. The more of these TOA journals (like Information Research) we have, the better!

In an earlier post I mentioned TiddlyWiki and my applications of it here and there. News about TiddlyWiki is best gathered by becoming a member of the relevant Google Group: one is for users in general and is mainly used for announcements and questions and answers - post a question and you'll usually get a very quick response from someone in the Group; the other is for those with the necessary technical skills to develop applications on TiddlyWiki or to contribute plug-ins and modifications.

Scanning both of these groups can be useful if you get into using TiddlyWiki: for example, a recent post drew my attention to Dave Gifford's Notes wiki, which is a nicely customised version for note taking with an excellent means of generating lists from the tags: you can get a version for yourself, if you right click on this link and then "Save link as...". That wiki advertised Dave's BibblyWiki - a version for creating and displaying bibliographic records of books and articles - again, get a copy by right clicking on this link and going through the same process. There's also a version in Spanish

The Developers' Group brought my attention to a number of things: a version of the basic TiddlyWiki in Brazilian Portuguese, and another in Portuguese Portuguese, and a very clever bookmarklet, which replaces the built-in search module of TW with YourSearch - not easy to describe what happens as a result but it means that you can search any TW with YourSearch. Of course, you need Firefox as your browser, although we are told that it may work in Opera and Safari

Peter Suber has an interesting comment on a message from Steven Harnad in Open Access News. He comments:

If there's a good OA journal in your field, and if it's no-fee or you can afford its fee or find a sponsor to pay it, then go for it. You'll help the journal and help yourself. But if there's not a good OA journal in your field, or if you can't afford the fee or find a sponsor to pay it, then remember that OA archiving provides bona fide OA. Publish in the best subscription journal that will accept your article and then deposit a copy of the postprint in an OA repository.

This seems to be eminently sensible advice and, as Information Research is a fully peer-reviewed journal of recognized quality, why do authors continue to submit to non-OA journals?

Rather more than 30 years ago I produced what was then called a 'programmed text' on chain indexing - apparently (at least according to a Google search) it still appears on some reading lists. The programmed text, in effect, implemented on paper the notion of hypertext.

I've occasionally thought of updating it, but not seriously until TiddlyWiki appeared on the scene. Now, as a result of a couple of days' work in retyping the text of the book, 'An introduction to chain indexing' is reborn as a true hypertext.

One of the benefits of using TiddlyWiki for this purpose is that the user can simply download a copy to his or her own hard disc (or portable medium of any kind) and use the text whether connected to the Internet or not, since everything needed to manipulate the text is actually built into the Web page.

I'll be interested to hear from anyone who uses the text or teaches the concept.

The latest issue of Information Research is now available at http://InformationR.net/ir/

Here is the Editorial

Introduction Managing an electronic journal is a non-trivial task and, although I have Associate Editors who help greatly in the process of evaluating submissions, the main work of getting the issues out is down to me. With the loss of my volunteer proof-reader, Rae-Ann Hughes, the checking is an additional load. It is something of a relief, therefore, to know that Lund University Libraries (our host institution for the server) is implementing the journal management package, Open Journal Systems. Together with the Associate Editors, I am in the process of testing the system and hope, shortly, that all submissions will be handled through OJS.

This said, there is still room for more volunteers to help with the production of the journal: ideally, a proof-reader who knows British English and an XHTML code editor would be very useful. So, if you have a little time on your hands (a vain hope in these days of overwork!), or if you are recently retired and interested in helping the open access movement, do contact me.

And, speaking of volunteers, thanks to Elena Maceviciute for her link checking this issue - a bigger task than usual, and to Pedro Dias and Jose Vicente Rodriguez for the Spanish abstracts; again, a much bigger task than previously.

In this issue The main work of this issue has been in preparing the final batch of papers from the Information Seeking in Context Conference, which was held in Sydney last year. As usual, the range is very wide, from the information needs of Iranian engineers, to the information behaviour of Taiwanese aborigines—evidence that the information behaviour field is dynamic and growing. Very few of the authors, however, explore the implications of their work for information practice, and I hope that the 2008 conference (to be held in Vilnius, Lithuania) will address this issue.

We also have five other peer-reviewed papers and another open access case study. The five papers cover very different topics: professional education in Brazil, Internet services in the countries of the European Union, students' use of the Internet for their Finnish Masters' theses, the impact of the Terrorist bombings in Madrid on the 11th March, 2004, on newspaper documentation centres (in Spanish) and a workflow model for scholarly communication. This last one is very long for a paper and the author has provided a link to a .pdf file so that you may print it out more easily. The case study deals with Medical Education Online, which was established (like Information Researh) by an individual, enthused by the idea of open access publishing.

Partly because of the ISIC papers, we have a good geographic spread of papers in this issue: USA - 4, Finland - 3, Japan - 2, Spain - 2, Brazil - 1, Canada - 1, Iran - 1, Singapore - 1, Taiwan - 1, UK - 1.

Google Analytics As I noted in the previous issue, I now use Google Analytics to monitor the use of the journal and (at the time of writing) I now have four months of data. The data show that the top page of the journal has had 35,323 'unique views' and 66,145 'page views' in this time - which I assume means that each visitor comes back to the top page ('home' on the navigation bar) at least once after the initial click. Extrapolating that for 2006 as a whole suggests that the top page has had 105,969 unique views and 198,435 page views. I've also been using OneStat.com since last April and it shows 32,517 page views for the top page in eight months - extrapolating gives us 48,775 for the year, which is significantly fewer than suggested by Google Analytics, so I'm not quite sure what's going on there :-). However, in 2005 we had 47,117 hits, so usage continues to increase. One thing is certain: the papers in Information Research are getting a lot of exposure!

The Editorial Board I am making changes to the Editorial Board, with a view to stabilizing membership by the beginning of the next volume. Membership is for a period of three years, renewable, and some members are now due to retire, so with this issue, we welcome three new members of the Editorial Board: Jim Jansen, Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi. Jim strengthens our representation of the Web research community, while Bonnie and Victor, apart from helping review papers for the activity theory issue due in April, strengthen the information systems area. Welcome folks!

The journal's publication schedule will also be changing, partly to bring the volume year into line with the calendar year and partly to avoid holiday periods as far as possible. So, this year, the final two issues of Volume 12 will be published in April and October and Volume 13 will have its four issues in March, June, September and December of 2008, with subsequent volumes having the same publication pattern. This way, I might actually have some holiday time at Christmas!

Given how far the month is advanced, it may seem a little late, but... a very Happy New Year!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Professor Tom Wilson, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief January 2007

With immediate effect, submissions to Information Research will be handled through the journal management system, Open Journal Systems. This will provide the Editors, Reviewers and Authors with direct access to the process of review and will maintain more effective statistics on the number of submissions, etc. Papers currently in the process of review will not be affected by this change.

Also, given the amount of work I had to do over the Christmas 'holiday' to get the January issue ready, I have decided to change the production schedule. This year, there will be issues in January, April, and October (the remaining three issues of volume 12), and, with effect from 2008, the volume will be conterminous with the calendar year, with the issues of volume 13 being published in March, June, September and December. This will also have the effect of avoiding a July issue, thereby enabling a genuine summer vacation :-)

For those interested in open access developments, Peter Suber's review of developments in 2006 should be essential reading.

It's a while since I've reviewed the state of the papers in Information Research in terms of the number of hits attracted. This time I give the information on the most hit papers in each volume (excluding the present volume, of course).

Probably the most interesting point is the way in which papers in the early volumes continue to attact hits - if you want your work to be used, publish in an open access electronic journal!

All of the numbers are live links to the counters, so they will be automatically updated if you bookmark this message and keep on revisiting.

Volume 1 - P. Riding, S.P. Fowell, and P.C.M. Levy
An action research approach to curriculum development

Volume 2 - Zita Correia and Tom Wilson
Scanning The Business Environment For Information:A Grounded Theory Approach

Volume 3 - Hooi-Im Ng, Ying Jie Pan, and T.D. Wilson
Business Use of The World Wide Web: a report on further investigations

Volume 4 - Joyce Kirk
Information in Organisations: Directions for Information Management

Volume 5 - T.D. Wilson
Recent trends in user studies: action research and qualitative methods

Volume 6 - Maija-Leena Huotari and T.D. Wilson
Determining organizational information needs: the Critical Success Factors approach

Volume 7 - Chun Wei Choo
Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning

Volume 8 - T.D. Wilson
The nonsense of knowledge management

Volume 9 - Jannica Heinström
Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour

Volume 10 - Christian Schlögl
Information and knowledge management: dimensions and approaches.

Volume 11 - Liana Kourteli
Scanning the business external environment for information: evidence from Greece

For years I used the free analytics site NedStat - originally set up by the Netherlands Statistical Office - but they sold out and the new company started using pop-up ads, so moved to OneFreeStat.com. Here's their analysis of the hits on the 'top ten' pages of the journal from April to December. It's interesting that the most hit paper is in Spanish: justification, I think for my decision to include papers in Spanish in the journal. After all, it is an 'international electronic journal', so why not? :-)

Table 1: OneStatFree analysis of pageviews from April to December 2006

Rank	Page	Pageviews	%
1.	Journal home page	37,753	34.63%
2.	Other	9,970	9.15%
3.	Contents page Vol. 11 No. 3	5,988	5.49%
4.	Contents page Vol. 11 No. 4	5,557	5.10%
5.	Paper258-Herrera-Solano & Hassan (in Spanish)	5,266	4.83%
6.	Contents page Vol. 12 No. 1	5,021	4.61%
7.	Contents page Vol. 11 No. 2	4,466	4.10%
8.	Paper254-Ankem	2,283	2.09%
9.	Paper260-Wilson	2,135	1.96%
10.	The Rest	30,559	28.04%
Total		108,998	100.00%

However for the site as a whole (i.e., information.r.net) I use Google Analytics, which has some pretty pictures:

 

 

This shows some interesting things: most visitors have been new visitors (almost by definition, given the short time the counters have been active), but 20% are returning visitors. When we compare that number with the percentage who come directly to the site (usually from bookmarks), i.e., 26%, we can guess that, probably, most of those who come directly, are returning visitors - my regular readers, if you like. The map is also instructive (although not as much as in the earlier message), particularly when you see the big bulge of users from China.

The 'top ten' pages from Google Analytics (covering the whole site, remember) are, naturally, different from the top ten identified by OneFreeStat.com:

Table 2: Google Analytics report

Rank	Page	Unique views	Page views
1.	Information Research (journal top page)	32,505	60,904
2.	World list... information studies, information management, etc	6,694	11,890
3.	Electronic Resources for Research Methods	5,314	9,124
4.	Europe: World list...	1,305	3,335
5.	(Page without the title tag)	1,809	2,561
6.	Information management (Wilson - Encyclopedia entry)	2,164	2,515
7.	USA - World list...	1,174	2,444
8.	Digital information in the Information Research field (open access magazines, etc.)	1,437	2,100
9.	World list... USA (a duplicate page - needs removing!)	790	1,943
10.	Alfred Schutz, phenomenology (Wilson - conf. paper)	1,637	1,820
Totals (whole site)		94,310	147,149

Maintaining this entire site is a pretty time-consuming task - or set of tasks! However, it looks as though most of what is provided is being used, and it will be interesting to see what the picture looks like when the Analytics cover an entire year. (Incidentally, it also shows the benefits of archiving your publications on your home site.)

All of this stuff is going to be used in one of the Open Access Case Studies running in the journal, so watch out for an update some time next year.

It's more fun than KFC :-)

 

 

The dots represent hits on the top page of the journal. The map is regularly updated and you can see it by scrolling down to the bottom of the page at http://InformationR.net/ir/

Peter Suber's Open Access Newsletter is always worth a read - and worth subscribing to, and this month's issue is particularly interesting, devoted as it is to the issue of quality in OA journals. Peter demolishes a number of myths, largely put about by the commercial publishers and provides links to lots and lots of evidence. If you are at all interested in open access, Peter's newsletter is a 'must read'.

Noted on the BOAI discussion list, this interesting report from Australia. (But does it really need a url of 206 characters?! Thank heaven for TinyURL)

The bottom line is that it would cost AuD10 million (i.e., a little under £4 million, or $7.5 million, or €6 million) to set up an Australia-wide archiving system for scholarly papers, but would deliver:

A benefit/cost ratio of 51 for the modelled impacts of open access to public sector research

Typically, however, the report considers only two alternatives as 'open access' - the 'author pays' model and the institutional repository. As long as committees of this kind are blind to the potential of subsidised journals, they will miss the opportunity of true open access.